Turning the Wheel of Wonder

This is a blog viewing the world, politics, social interactions, spiritual quests, and the pathless Way from a Buddhist-Progressive-Psychological perspective.
ZEN MASTER LINJI'S WARNING:
"Followers of the Way, do not seek for anything in written words. You will tire your heart and inhale icy air without profit."
George Carlin's Warning:
"The owners of this country know the truth: its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Sunday, November 04, 2018

Bursting another bubble here. Dogen did not coin the phrase
"practice and realization" (修證,
PY. xiūzhèng, J. shusho) or as I prefer to translate it, "practice and
proof” (could also be “cultivation and confirmation” or "practice and
verification"). Virtually every phrase or slogan that Dogen
is famous for in his writings (circa 1230 to his death in 1254) was not coined
by him, but picked up and used by him in his unique stylization of poetic prose.
This also applies to what is perhaps his most famous phrase “practice and
realization” (sometimes “practice and enlightenment” or “practice and verification”
depending on the translator).The term 證zhèng
(J. sho) is a subject of some controversy because it means “proof, witness, verification,
confirmation,” etc, but is very loosely translated as “realization” or even “enlightenment.”
Dogen specially emphasized that practice
and its proof are one (修證一如), that is, we don’t practice to be able to prove enlightenment
later, but that our correct practice is itself the proof of enlightenment. This is just like the English idiom “the
proof is in the pudding.”

This teaching of Japanese Zen Master Dogen is so famously
known in Zen circles by its Japanese pronunciation “shusho” that many Western
Zen students and teachers erroneously believe that Dogen coined the phrase. Not
so. I have not done an extensive search for
the origin of the phrase, but I did come across it in the opus text written 400
years before Dogen, circa 835, by Chinese Zen Master Gjuifeng Zongmi titled Introduction
to the Collection of the Various Expositions of the Fountainhead of Zen.

Sadly, the voluminous collection of the main text has been
lost and only the introduction remains extant. In his “Introduction to the Fountainhead of
Chan” Zongmi details how Chan/Zen is the stream of Buddhism related to the
direct awakening to mind and how the Chan/Zen stream relates to the stream of
the teachings of the sutras and treatises. In doing so, Zongmi distinguishes
the characteristics of the various branches of the Chan/Zen lineages stemming
from Bodhidharma and correlates them to the various categories and teachings of
the sutras and treatises.

In a section naming the Diamond-Cutter Sutra and the
Lankavatara Sutra and affirming that “these two
sutras are the essence of our mind,” Zongmi points out how disciples of the
time have confused ideas about this and who practice or cultivate mind consider
the sutras and treatises as a separate lineage and those who explain and
articulate the sutras and treatises consider the Chan/Zen Gate as a separate Dharma.
Zongmi then says,

“Hearing
discussion of cause and effect and of practice and proof, they immediately
suppose it belongs to the family
of sutras and treatises. They don’t know that practice and proof are directly the
root matter of the Chan gate.

Hearing the articulation ‘exactly
Mind is exactly Buddha,’ they immediately suppose it belongs to the Chan of inner
feelings. They don’t know Mind and Buddha are directly the root mentation
of the sutras and treatises.”

So it looks like Zongmi’s phrase “practice and proof (修證, J. shusho)are directly the
root matter of the Chan gate” struck a chord with Dogen and he elaborated on the
theme.

Wednesday, February 07, 2018

If you’ve got an answer, we want to hear it. So, tell us by sending an email to themoment@lionsroar.com. Please keep your response to a maximum of 200 words. We might well include your answer in our magazine department “Share Your Wisdom.”

Be sure to include your name and location, and a photo of yourself (at least 400 pixels wide).

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Here's my submitted response to the question: Do you believe in rebirth?

1) No and yes. As Carl G. Jung said to the
question "Do you believe in God?", I say, "I don't believe; I
know."

2) Also, cross-culturally, Jung said that all cultures have some
variation of rebirth/reincarnation incorporated in their worldviews.

3) This life is the proof of life after
death. There is no logical basis to say this is the "first
life" or refute this is a "rebirthed life."

4) I've experience past life memories that are
equal to any early childhood memory.

5) The logic that no physical energy is lost,
but only changes form, applies equally to the mind energy of empty-suchness and
its change of form from one life to another.

6) No individual ego-self or 'soul' is reborn,
but the wave formation patterns of karma are perceived as
"transmigrated" from the perspective of our constructed time-space
continuum. A single life is like a single peak of a wave in an ocean that not
move horizontally; it moves vertically up and down. The karma wave is what
moves horizontally, so the Lankavatara
Sutra says it is the ocean that is reborn in each peak, not the person of
the previous peak.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

.Capitalism is a religion. The highpriests of the religion are called “the owners.” The thologians of the religion are called “economists.” The promise of religious salvation is called the opportunity to achieve wealth. The superstitious articles of faith of the religion are that the owners deserve what they own because they have earned their wealth. The truth is that no capitalist has ever earned their wealth, because all wealth derives from labor and the land, and the capitalist has always used armed soldiers to steal the land and its fruits from the community residing on the land and has always stolen the fruit of the worker’s labor unto themselves and called it “profit.”That's how it has looked to me, for at least 50 years. And, of course, I'm not the only one who has noticed that "Capitalism is the West’s Dominant Religion".

Abraham Lincoln knew that good government would restrain the capitalist from taking the fruits of labor from the laborer. He said,

"Labor is prior to, and independent of,
capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if
labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves
much the higher consideration."

"And, inasmuch [as] most good things are
produced by labour, it follows that such things of right belong to those
whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the
world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a
large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as
possible, is a most worthy object of any good government."

I would argue that the religion of Buddhism is much closer to the religion of Lincoln than to the religion of capitalism. Buddhism says it is a meritorious virtue not to steal, not to tell lies, and not to kill. Capitalism depends on all three: killing, lying, and stealing, just to survive, much less to thrive.

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral
principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned
with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of
production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes--that is, the majority--as
well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the
victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it
seems fair. I just recently read an article in a paper where His Holiness the Pope also pointed
out some positive aspects of Marxism.

As for the failure of the Marxist regimes, first of all I do not consider the former USSR, or
China, or even Vietnam, to have been true Marxist regimes, for they were far more concerned
with their narrow national interests than with the Workers' International.

The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but
the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.

I agree in the main with these observations.

Whether or not it is called "socialism", any economic system that does not kill, lie, and steal in order for it to function is consistent with Buddhist values. Of course this means articulating the contextual dimensions, contours, and limits of such terms as killing, lying, and stealing, but the discussion needed to provide that articulation is exactly the discussion that is taboo in the religion of capitalism.

Monday, January 15, 2018

The first half of the 20th century brought into
the light of Western consciousness the great discovery of the unconscious.The great initial pioneer Sigmund Freud,
followed by the even greater explorer and surveyor Carl G. Jung, showed the
world the actual workings of the unconscious in our conscious lives, from the
most individually mundane effects, such as our tics and foibles, to the most
collective inundations of our collective consciousness in war and mass phenomenon
such as fascism, communism, and commercialism.

Then after the most compelling and complete demonstration of
the overcoming of collective rationality by the irrationality of the collective
unconscious from WWI to the culmination that was World War II, Western collective
consciousness reacted by closing down and shutting away the very
acknowledgement of the unconscious.Western psychology turned to rationalism in hope of explaining the
irrational, and the unconscious was driven out of psychology, with “psychology”
being redefined without the unconscious element as “behaviorism,” “cognitive
studies,” ”neuro-psychology” “evolutionary psychology,” etc.This is an utter and complete failure,
because the totality of the psyche includes both the conscious and the unconscious,
and any attempt to rationally explain the irrational aspects of the unconscious
by ignoring the unconscious is set up for failure.

The rationalist delusion of the previous 70 years has forced
the psychology of the unconscious underground.And as Jung noted over and over again, when an important part of our
psychic reality is submerged, it always and inevitably comes back to overwhelm
us in ways we find problematic.The
denied elements of our personal unconscious, the complexes, reappear as disturbances
in our body or mental functions, as somatic symptoms or psychic disturbances
such as hauntings or obsessions.The
denied elements of our collective unconscious, the archetypes, reappear in
stark polarized contrasts as “demons,” “daimons,” or “divinities,” as social
contagions resulting in genocide, occupation, and apartheid, as social mass
movements for weal or woe seeming to appear overnight, etc.

No matter how much people may try, there is no exclusively
rational explanation for the election of Donald Trump as president, because it
is an expression of the repressed unconscious factors that created a “faith”
mentality in the people who voted for him. The rationality of consciousness
(organized as it is around the ego complex) can never deal with faith, because
the best that rationality can offer can never touch the unconscious basis of
faith.Rationally can only call “faith”
a form of nonsense, i.e. irrational, and then believe it has taken care of the
matter.

In analyzing the problem of the rationalist critique of
faith without reference to the unconscious, Jung wrote in “A Psychological
Approach to the Trinity”:“Naturally, it
never occurs to these critics that their way of approach is incommensurable with
their object. They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it
entirely escapes then that it is and always has been primarily a question of
irrational psychic phenomena.” (p. 153 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.)It is the denial of a basic recognition of
the collective psychic phenomena at work in the Trump election that befuddles
all attempts by the political and social pundits to explain it.

We have seen over and over again interviews with “Trump
followers” who deny the basis facts of Trump and instead project onto Trump a
faithful expectation that he will eventually fulfill their desires for a better
government.This is an act of faith of
the deepest feelings. The factual historical personality is obscured behind the
projections of the unconscious looking for an appropriate screen upon which to
projects its symbols.When faith is at
work for a “higher cause,” it is invariably the archetype of the totality of
the person, i.e., the individual’s wholeness, attempting to find its way into
consciousness.The psychic phenomena of
a person who feels cut off, separated, and estranged from both themselves and
their society stimulates their collective unconscious to respond by insinuating
the archetype of their self-realization of their fundamental totality into
their personal consciousness.This is
experienced directly and irrationally, and even the person’s own
rationalizations used to explain it come after the fact.

The recognition of the unconscious opens a door to the
confusing and terrifying emotions, imaginings, and thoughts of our inner life
that most people are more than happy to close immediately. The anti-Trump voter
as well as the Trump voter are equally eager to pretend there are no psychic
phenomena at play here, and it is all just a matter of rational analysis and
discussion to determine the facts. But the abrupt and widespread appearance of
the social meme of “fake news” in conjunction with the “Trump-era” shows the
archetypal influence behind Trump’s meteoric rise in politics. The label “fake
news” is telling us to our faces that the collective social forces we are
dealing with are irrational psychic forces working on the level of symbols not
facts. Itr is not a question of which media outlet is or is not dealing in
“fake news,” because at bottom, they all are in their own ways.The New York Times has its particular way of
presenting “fake news” just like FOX News has its own way of presenting “fake
news.” The common denominator of all fake news is its failure to address its
contextual prejudices supporting its perspective, and this is due to the
failure to acknowledge the unconscious psychic phenomena at work in the
presentation of the news.

The completeness which the archetype of our own wholeness
seeks is not something that can tamed or determined by our conscious ego.Our conscious ego seeks our wholeness from
within the bifurcated environment of consciousness, and therefore can only
conceive of wholeness and totality as “perfection.”But real wholeness and totality must
necessarily include our nocturnal side, the very aspects of ourselves that we
have shunned or exiled.Thus when we
consciously open ourselves to a search for our wholeness, we are faced with the
problem of suffering and “evil” in the world and in ourselves as intimately
expressed by our own shadow side.People
who long for such wholeness, but have no personal guide who has experienced the
journey, are confused by the necessity to confront the world of suffering
directly and personally as the gateway to inner unity. They think they can find
the perfection of wholeness without facing suffering.In his extensive monograph “Aion: Researches
Into the Phenomenology of the Self,” Jung notes:

“To strive after teleiosis in the
sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity
which provides civilization with one of its strongest roots. This striving is
so powerful, even, that it can turn into a passion that draws everything into
its service. Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the
archetype fulfills its own completeness, and this is a τελείωσις (teleiosis)
of quite another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness is forced upon us against all our conscious
strivings, in accord with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual may
strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect— τελειόι--as also your heavenly
father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for
the sake of his completeness.”(p. 69 Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part
II.)

When we seek the wholeness of ourselves, we are usually
drawn by affinity to a living archetypal symbol of that wholeness such as the
Buddha or the Christ.If we follow the
Buddha we must begin the journey with the First Noble Truth of Suffering, and
if we follow the Christ we must begin with identification with the Passion
(i.e., suffering) and crucifixion of the Christ.The Taoist archetypal symbol of wholeness,
the Taiji is not anthropomorphic, but
its containment of the opposites of yin and yang, dark and light, within the
circle of completeness confronts the follower directly with the necessity of
dealing with their own dark side if wholeness is to be realized. Ultimately there is no way to wholeness except
through the confrontation and integration of suffering and the shadow side of
ourselves. We can’t become complete by running away from suffering.

It is the archetypal unconscious impetus to seek
completeness being perverted by the conscious prejudice against suffering that
leads to the illusion we can become perfect by getting rid of the “bad things
of life.” This psychic phenomenon is exactly expressed in the Trump voters’
resonance with the symbol of “draining the swamp” projected onto
government.Those who would be
personally perfect and then project this desire onto the social screen desire a
perfect government. Their own sense of imperfection, as a being personally filled
with swamp creatures within their own inner world, is projected outward onto
the government as a swamp needing to be drained.The psychic dimension of this projection is
evidenced by the denial of the Trump voters who literally can not see that
Trump has brought more “swamp creatures” into his government than any previous
president. This self-blinding in consciousness is a primary symptom of the
archetype’s unconscious influence.

Trump is the manifested expression of our denial of the
unconscious. The so-called anti-Trump resistance is also an expression of our
denial of the unconscious as shown by its psychic contagion of a new Mc Carthyite
“red scare” anti-Russian hysteria.Because the anti-Trump forces can not acknowledge either the conscious
or unconscious psychic forces behind Trump’s popularity, they project their
dissociated psychic contents, with the sense of “evil,” onto an available
target like “Russia,” so that they no longer care for the facts to be proven
before they are certain of their conclusions. Their certainty before the
determination of any evidence and their eager grasping at any straw or
suggestion of “collusion” without a verification demonstrate conclusively the
unconscious influences.

So what happened to the unconscious?It seems that humankind’s struggle with its
own dark side in WWII was so traumatic that our collective consciousness
revolted against itself and drove out the messenger that offered the only hope
of understanding what had happened because merely trying to understand was too
terrible. Using the terminology of rationalism, the study of the unconscious
was tarred and feathered as “mystical” or, to use a more technical term, “woo
woo.”.This kind of over-rationalization and sloganeering literalization by the
perspective of materialism shows the unconscious influence in the repression
itself.Materialism became the new
religion of science and dogmatically repressed the scientific study of psychic
phenomenon from the psychological perspective.Only the materialist perspective was officially allowed in the post-war
study of the psyche within the major educational institutions funded by commercial
and military interests.

Psychology deals with the facts of mental contents. The fact
that the idea or symbol exists as a psychic phenomenon is the truth that
psychology studies. Thus the fact of the idea or symbol of a God (or the
Buddhist Dharmakaya of Taoist Taiji) as the symbol of our own desire for
wholeness, and the incarnation or birth of that symbol as a person who
manifests that wholeness in human form (e.g., Christ, Buddha, or Immortal), is
the rightful object of the study of psychology, and this is not a question of
neurons firing or the literal historical objectification of the symbol in any
particular individual. It is not the individual but the archetypal symbol
projected onto the individual that allows the historical person to be honored
or worshipped far beyond the historical death of the individual, precisely
because the archetypal aspect is collective not individual..

As Jung said, “It is certainly a good thing to preach reason
and commons sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a
crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because
the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal overwhelming forces.” (p.
15 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.) The impersonal overwhelming forces of the
collective unconscious that brought Trump to the presidency must be studied and
understood or we make a fatal mistake in regard to the human psyche as well as
to our society and culture. .

Monday, December 25, 2017

Caveat Lector:Examples
of false or misleading statements to beware of:

(1) “The ' Mind Only School’ is a Mahayana school founded by Asanga.”

(2) “The Chittamatra ( Mind-Only) Philosophical School.”

(3)“[he]was influenced by the development of
Buddhist ‘idealism’, the Yogacara or Cittamatra tradition.”

(4)“Hsuan-tsang selected K‘uei-chi as the chief
transmitter of the Mind-Only Buddhism that he brought back from India.”

(5)“Ge-luk-ba scholars hold that even for the
Proponents of Mind-Only the Perfection of Widsom Sutras are the supreme of
sutras, even though their literal reading must be interpreted.”

Corrections:

(1) “ Mind-only” or cittamatra,
is not synonymous with Yogacara and is not a formal “school” in the manner of
the Yogacara school foundered by the half-brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu (or in
the manner of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, and their
followers).Mind-only is an orientation or
perspective based on meditative realization whose coherence may be called a
movement or tradition, not a doctrinaire school. There is no “founder” of the
teaching of Mind-only awareness outside the Sutras.

(2) Mind-only is not
a philosophical school and is not “a philosophy” in any modern sense of the
word. The terms “doctrine” and “philosophy” just do not apply to Mind-only.

(3) Mind-only is not ‘idealism’
as that term is used in Western contexts.Tibetan Buddhists, because of their emphasis on commentary over Sutra,
erroneously hold that there are only two major streams of philosophical thought
in Buddha Dharma: that of Madhyamaka and Cittamatra, and they mistakenly use
the name Cittamatra or Mind-only as a term for the Yogacara tradition and
teachings. Yogacara teachings are primarily Consciousness-only (Skt. vijnanamatra) and Conscious-data-only
(Skt. vijnaptimatra), and only
indirectly and tangentially connected to Mind-only.

(4) The Buddhism that Xuanzang (Hsuan-tsang, 596–664)
brought back with him from India
was one of the Yogacara school’s branches as taught by Dharmapala, as opposed
to the other 7th century Yogacara branch taught by Sthiramati. And
neither of these two branches was the 6th century Yogacara branch perspective
based on One Vehicle Buddhism brought to China by Paramartha 100 years before
Xuanzang, and also taught by Wonchuk a student of Xuanzang who did not
completely accept his version of Yogacara because he had previously studied
Paramartha’s version and would not disavow its perspective as demanded by the
other students of Xuangzang establishing their otrthodoxy.

(5) Actually, Mind-only, i.e., cittamatra, is a core teaching of the One Vehicle (Skt. Ekayana) movement that appeared prior to
Asanga and Vasubandhu and is found in the One Vehicle sutras, such as the Lotus Sutra, Avatamsaka Sutra, Samdhinirmocana
Sutra, and Lankavatara Sutra, that
the Samdhinirmocana Sutra termed “the
Third Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma”. Thus, it is the One Vehicle Sutras
that are received as “the supreme sutras” for the proponents of Mind-only, not
the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom or Transcendent Wisdom) Sutras. In
general, the Yogacara teachers who self-identified as such, with best
intentions, appropriated the Mind-only teachings from the One Vehicle sutras, but
they extracted them out of context to construct a separate system of doctrines
that emphasized their own commentarial schemes.

Clarifications:

I learned about “ Mind-only” (Skt. cittamatra, while some translators
capitalize the “-Only” I do not and follow the convention of other translators
such as D.T. Suzuki.) through the so-called “East Asian” Buddhism of China,
Korea, and Japan. In the Buddha Dharma that permeated China and flowed through to Korea and Japan, the “ Mind-only” movement
and perspective is derived from the One Vehicle Sutras and expressed in such phrases
as:

“I designate not giving birth to
antithetical conceptions and the complete realization that existence and
nonexistence are nothing but the manifestations of one’s own mind.” (Lankavatara Sutra)

“That, in the clear and pure mind
of one’s own nature yet there is contamination, is difficult to be able to
comprehend.”(Queen Srimala’s Lion’s Roar Sutra)

“The three realms are vacant and
false, and are only the doings of mind.”(Dasubhumika-sutra, part
of the Avatamsaka Sutra)

“Since there is only the ultimate meaning of mind,
characteristics depend on the root emptiness, on objectless emptiness, on the
emptiness of one’s own essence, on the essenceless emptiness of one’s own
essence, and on the emptiness of the ultimate meaning, that sever those
characteristics of difficult cultivation and practice.” (Samdhinirmocana Sutra)

Though the designation seems to be lost to
modernity, Chan/Zen Buddhism was called the “BuddhaMindSchool (Lineage)” (佛心宗) for its emphasis of the Mind-only
perspective through such teaching phrases as “ Mind is Buddha,” “ordinary Mind
is the Way,” “the Dharma of the One Mind,” etc. And of course there is the famous Zen motto:

"Not established by written words,
Transmitted separately outside the
teaching,
Pointing straight to the human mind,
To see the nature and become Buddha.”Thus, the One Vehicle tradition
found in Tiantai, Huayen, and Zen were the expressions of the Mind-only
tradition.For example, Chan/Zen Master
Huangbo Xiyun (J. Obaku Kiun) (d. c. 850) said in the Synopsis of the Dharma of Transmitting Mind
of Zen Master Duanji of Huangbo Mountain (黃檗山斷際禪師傳心法要) written by his lay disciple Pei Xiu
(797-870), a government official and member of the Chinese literati:

The Tathagata appeared in the
world and wanted to explain the True Dharma of the One Vehicle, however the
multitude of beings did not believe and raised slanders, sinking in the sea of
sufferings.If he did not explain at
all, however, he’d fall into stingy greed, and not serve as the subtle Way of
universal renunciation for the multitude of beings.He proceeded to establish the expediency of
explaining there are three vehicles. For the vehicles there is great and small;
for attainment there is shallow and deep. All are not the original Dharma.For this reason it was said, “There is only
the Way of the One Vehicle, two or more however, are not true.”So, in the end, because he had not yet displayed
the Dharma of the One Mind, he called Kasyapa to share the Dharma seat and
separately handed over the One Mind, going away from words to explain the
Dharma. The Dharma of this One Branch decrees a distinguished practice.If you are able to agree with those who
awaken, then you arrive at the Buddha stage! (My translation from [T48n2012Ap0382b03
to T48n2012Ap0382b09])

This distinction seemed straight forward to me with
the YogacaraSchool being correctly labeled the Consciousness–only
(vijnanamatra) or Conscious-data-only
(vijnaptimatra) tradition as
distinguished from the Mind-only (cittamatra)
tradition of Huayen and Chan/Zen.The
term vijnapti is not uniformly
translated in the way that vijnana
is. Vijnapti has been translated as
“representation” (e.g. D.T.
Suzuki), “perception” (e.g. Stefan Anacker), “projection” (e.g., Ben Connelly
and Weijen Teng), “forms of
consciousness” (e.g., Wutai)
“cognition” (e.g. Sāgaramati), “consciousness” (e.g., Diana Paul), etc.Because of the common root conscious “vijna” shared with conscious-ness (vijna-na), I say that the word vijna-apti
(one of the “a”s is dropped in the conjunction) should be translated using
“conscious” as the prefix and a term for “apti as the suffix. The term “apti” means that which is noticed and
what is represented in consciousness, i.e., the information or data of
consciousness. Thus, vijnapti has
connotations suggesting of the modern notions of semiosis or sign process. So I
am currently preferring to translate vijna-apti
as “conscious-data” to indicate the meaning of the data points of
consciousness. Other translations could be “conscious-sign,”
“conscious-notice,” “conscious-information,” etc.

However, when I came into contact with Tibetan
Buddhist teachings there was an immediate cognitive dissonance and frustration
with their use of the term “ Mind-only.” The Tibetan traditions are derived
from post-seventh century Indian Buddhism that had morphed into a Doctrinaire
Buddhism based on Treatises over Sutras on the one hand and Tantric Buddhism on
the other. While Chinese Buddhism is derived from pre-eighth century Indian
Buddhism that was primarily Sutra based.

For example, wanting to learn what the Tibetan
teachings are on Mind-only entailed, I picked up Jeffrey Hopkins’ Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of
Buddhism and was completely shocked to see that they use the label “ Mind-only”
erroneously for the Yogacara teachings and do not have a distinct awareness or
acknowledgement of Mind-only as a different tradition from Yogacara.This erroneous designation is found in other
books describing Tibetan Buddhism such as the generalist survey Mahayana Buddhism, The Doctrinal Foundations
by Paul Williams. Caveat Lector: Williams does not advise the reader that he is
presenting Mahayana Buddhism from his Tibetan Buddhist perspective, so that
unacknowledged standpoint makes his presentation of Yogacara as Mind-only into
an expression Tibetan Buddhist prejudice. Reading these books using the label “ Mind-Only”
when they mean Yogacara was nearly nauseating to me, in the sense of creating a
vertigo sensation where many times on nearly every page I have to do a mental
translation to read “Yogacara” or “ Consciousness-only” when they write “ Mind-only.”

Though I personally came to this understanding of
the Tibetan usage of “ Mind-only” relatively late, as I had mostly ignored
Tibetan Buddhism until a couple years ago, this problem was acknowledged in a
paper from the journal Philosophy East
and West, volume 27, No.1, January 1977, by Whalen Lai titled “The Meaning
of ‘ Mind-only’ (wei-hsin): An analysis of a sinitic Mahayana
phenomenon.”His paper begins:

Modern Japanese Buddhologists,
following a distinction that was evident already in the T'ang Buddhist circles,
speak of a Mind-Only (Sanskrit: Cittamatra)
school usually covering Zen and Hua-yen as being distinct from, and superior to,
the Consciousness-Only (Sanskrit: Vijnaptimatra)
tradition, represented by the Wei-shih school (Fa-hsing) of Hsuan-tsang's
followers.(1) This distinction between the so-called Wei-hsin (Mind-Only) and Wei-shih
(Consciousness-Only) is often assumed to be self-evident. However, there is, in
Indian Buddhism, only one term, Yogacara or Vijnaptimatra,
covering these two distinct branches in China. In the Tibetan Buddhist canon
also, the section known as Cittamatra
designates only Yogacara texts. There is no sharp distinction made in India or Tibet between Cittamatra and Vijnaptimatra,
Mind-Only or Consciousness-Only, or, for
that matter, between citta, mind, or (alaya) -vijnana, (storehouse)-consciousness. In Yogacara traditions, citta is often another term for alayavijnana. How is it then that the
Chinese and then the Japanese have this clear notion that Mind-Only is
something other than, and superior to, Consciousness-Only?
(Page 65, I have altered his style of writing the Sanskrit words.)

Yes, in my studies of Mind-only from the Chinese,
Korean, and Japanese Buddhist perspective , I too learned that Mind-Only is “other
than and superior to Consciousness-Only.” While I agree with Lai on many
points, especially the acknowledgement of the problem, I don’t agree with much
of his analysis (as he tries to make the problem out to be a translation issue
and not a systems issue), and I think that he too misunderstands the Indian sources
for Mind-only when he denies their existence. The problem seems to lie in the distinction
between placing primary reliance on the Sutras themselves or on the Treatises (Shastras) of the Indian doctrinal
masters, and as followed by the Tibetan masters of doctrinal scholasticism,
that interpret the Sutras. When Lai
says, “There is no sharp distinction made in India between Cittamatra and Vijnaptimatra, Mind-Only or
Consciousness-Only” he is referring to the distinctions made by the Indian
Yogacara teachers’ treatises, not in the Sutras themselves. This is not
surprising in that the Yogacara teachers were confusing the mind and
consciousness teachings of the Sutras and deliberately failing to acknowledge
the distinctions between the terms.

D.T. Suzuki
refers to this problem in his Studies of
the Lankavatara Sutra:

There
is one thing in the foregoing account given by Tao-hsiian of the history of the
Lankavatara that requires notice: that there was another school in the
study of the sutra than the one transmitted by [Bodhi]Dharma and Hui-k'e. This
was the school of
Yogacara idealism. The
line of Hui-k'e belonged to the Ekayana school (一乘宗) of Southern India which was also the one
resorted to by [Bodhi]Dharma himself when he wanted to discourse on the
philosophy of Zen Buddhism. To this Ekayana school belong the Avatamsaka and
the Straddhotpanna as well as the Lankavatara properly interpreted.
But as the latter makes mention of the system of the eight Vijnanas whose
central principle is designated as Alayavijnana, it has been used by the
Yogacara followers as one of their important authorities. (P. 55.)

The doctrine expounded in the Lankavatara and
also in the Avatamsaka-sutra is known as the Cittamatra and never as the
Vijnanamatra or Vijnaptimatra as in the Yogacara school of Asanga
and Vasubandhu. (P. 181.)

Suzuki
adds in the introduction to his translation of the Lankavatara Sutra:

This is the point where the Lanka
comes in contact with the Yogacara school. The Yogacara is essentially
psychological standing in contrast in this respect to the Madhyamaka school
which is epistemological. But the Alayavijnana of the Yogacara is not the same
as that ofthe Lanka and the Awakening
of Faith. The former conceives the Alaya to be purity itself with nothing
defiled in it whereas the Lanka and the Awakening make it the
cause of purity and defilement. Further, the Yogacara upholds the theory of
Vijnaptimatra and not that of Cittamatra, which belongs to the Lanka,
Avatamsaka, and Awakening of Faith.The difference is this:
According to the Vijnaptimatra, the world is nothing but ideas, there are no
realities behind them; but the Cittamatra states that there is nothing but
Citta, Mind, in the world and that the world is the objectification of Mind.
The one is pure idealism and the other idealistic realism. To realise the
Cittamatra is the object of the Lanka, and this is done when
Discrimination is discarded, that is, when a state of non-discrimination is
attained in one's spiritual life. Discrimination is a logical term and belongs
to the intellect. Thus we see that the end of the religious discipline is to go
beyond intellectualism, for to discriminate, to divide, is the function of the
intellect. Logic does not lead one to self-realisation.

The problem
of confusionof terms can be traced at least back to Vasubandhu who at times failed
to clearly distinguish the difference between Consciousness-Only (vijnanamatra) and Mind-only (cittamatra). Though in his Thirty Verses he appears to distinguish Consciousness-only (vijnanamatra) from Conscious-data-only (vijnaptimatra) without mentioning Mind-only, and in his The Teaching of the Three Own-Beings he
does mention Mind-only in a manner that can be construed as being superior to
Consciousness-only (vijnanamatra)
from Conscious-data-only (vijnaptimatra),
the followers of the Yogacara school in general tend to overlook these
distinctions and be comfortable with the confusion caused by conflation of the
terms.For example, Vasubandhu begins his
“Twenty Verses and Commentary”
stating:

In the Great Vehicle, the three
realms of existence are determined as being perception-only [vijnaptimatra].As it is said in the [Dasa-bhumika section of the Avatamsaka]
sutra, “The three realms of existence are citta-only.” Citta, manas,
conscousness, and perceptions are synonyms.” (Stefen Anacker translation in Seven Works of Vasubandhu, p. 161,
brackets added by me.)

We can see from this excerpt that
Vasubandhu can blithely gloss over the very important distinctions between the
terms mind (citta), cognition (manas), consciousness (vijnana), and perceptions (vijnapti, i.e., conscious-data, not
perception samjna).Mind , consciousness, and conscious-data have
all had the term “-only” (matra)
attached to them in various teachings, while manas never has “-only” attached to it in that way. Thus, any
approach to understanding Mind-only (cittamatra)
must begin by distinguishing it from Conscousness-only (vijnanamatra) and Conscious-data-only (vijnaptimatra) which is exactly what the Yogacara teachers Asanga
and Vasubandhu fail to adequately do. Instead Vasubandhu uses the terms mostly as
synonyms because of, it seems, his preference for the terms Consciousness-only
and Conscious-data-only which he uses much more frequently than Mind-only. However,
while I think this “error of synonyms” is Vasubandhu’s greatest weakness, it
should not suggest that I think any less of Vasubandhu’s great works overall.

A further discussion of the
differences between these three “-onlys” of Mind-only, Consciousness-only, and Conscious-data-only will have to wait for a subsequent
post. For now, the important point is that Mind-only is inclusive of
consciousness, and conscious-data but that the other two are not inclusive of
mind in the sense of all things are only manifestations of mind. From the Mind-only
perspective, mind is the ocean, consciousness is the dynamic surface of the
ocean, and conscious-data are the apparently individual peaks of the waves on
the ocean.Thus, to say that either the
peaks of the waves or the moving surface of the ocean are synonymous with the
ocean is an absurdity. They too are the ocean, and they are not separate from
the ocean, but they not the round fullness that includes the profound depths of
the complete ocean.

This leads us to the question of
where genuine Mind-only teaching is to be found in the Tibetan doctrinal
systems that mistakenly call the Yogacara “ Mind-only.” It is found in two places. First it is hidden
in the doctrinal discussion of the so-called Tathagatagarbha texts, which is actually a misnomer when applied to
the One Vehicle texts. Tathagatagarbha
means the “Inner Tathagata” of each person and is an interesting word composed
of three elements thus (tatha), come
(agata), and inner (garbha). “Tathagata,” the
“Thus-come-one,” or “One who comes as thusness”, is the self-referential term
used in the Sutras by the Buddha instead of the first-person pronoun “I.”Without going into too much explanation, I
translate garbha as “inner” to render
the term Tathagatagarbha as “the
Inner Tathagata” in the sense of the psychological term the Inner Child.Garbha
has several connotations, such as fetus, womb, matrix, and sanctum sanctorum, i.e., a very private or secret place.The garbha
of the tathagata is the private place
or buried seed within each of us from where our Buddha Nature is germinated and
brought forth.In other words, it is the
essence of our own mind’s most personal being that is identical with Buddha in
the sense of Mind is Buddha.

The scholars’ conflation of the
Tathagatagarbha teaching with the teachings of the One Vehicle Sutras, and thus
obscuring the One Vehicle teachings, is the second most important reason (after
the confusion of synonyms) that Mind-only has not been sufficiently analyzed in
the doctrine-oriented scholarship of both Tibetan monastic colleges and Western
academies.This is because the scholars
(both of old and today, in both Tibet and the West) prefer to extract and
appropriate specific teachings out of the One Vehicle Sutras to create
doctrinal systems to ply against each other.

However, the primary purpose (paramartha) of the One Vehicle Sutras is
found in their synthesis and syncretism of the Buddha Dharma. So when the One
Vehicle Sutras, like Queen Srimala’s
Lion’s Roar Sutra and the Lankavatara
Sutra address the various topics like the Eight Consciousnesses, the Three
Own-natures, the Four Noble Truths, the Five skandhas, Emptiness (sunyata), Dharmakaya, Tathagatagarbha, etc. it is not listing them in order
to be extracted by various schools, but listing them as notions already
variously taught within the Buddha Dharma that must be synthesized and
syncretised in order to personally know and see the Tathagata’s awareness as the
inclusive, whole or compete teaching (圓教)
known as the Third Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma.

And second, from my reading of Hopkins, the genuine Mind-only
teaching in Tibetan Buddhism is found in the Jo-nang-ba school promoted by
Shay-rap-gyel-tsen (1292-1360). The Gelug-ba school’s founder Dzong-ka-ba
(1357-1419) was a prolific author who appears to have written one of his most
famous treatises The Essence of Eloquence
in large part to refute the real Mind-only teachings of Shay-rap-gyel-tsen
(diacritical marks omitted, hereafter “Shay” when not in quoted material) and
his Jo-nang-ba school by presenting the Yogacara as the only legitimate and
orthodox Mind-only school. Using a process of “synthesis” (a hallmark of the
One Vehicle) Shay coined the term “the Great Middle Way” which appears to be his
own version of the One Vehicle. (Yes, I need to study this more before making too
firm conclusions.)As Hopkins points out:

For instance, he [Shay] considered
separate passages of the Sutra Unraveling
the Thought [Samdhinirmocana Sutra],
usually considered to be Mind-Only [i.e., Yogacara] to present the views of Mind-Only
and the Great Middle Way, the latter being concordant with Ultimate Mind-Only,
or Supermundane Mind-Only, which is beyond consciousness.” (Hopkins, p. 51.)

The terms Ultimate Mind-Only, or
Supermundane Mind-Only appear to refer to the real Mind-only, not to Yogacara’s
“ Mind-only,” as Shay notes his Ultimate Mind-Only is beyond the Consciousness-only of the Yogacara. This
concordance of “Ultimate Mind-Only” with the “Great Middle Way” indicates Shay is
referring to a perspective consonant with the One Vehicle’s ultimate purpose (paramartha).As stated, one primary hallmark of the One
Vehicle is its syncretic approach to the plethora of teaching in the Buddha
Dharma.Hopkins says,

Thus Shay-rap-gyel-tsen’s synthesis
was by no means a collage drawing a little from here and a little from there
and disregarding the rest. Rather, he had a comprehensive, thorough, and
overarching perspective born from careful analysis. For him, others had just
not seen what the texts themselves were saying and, instead of that, red into
the classical texts the views of single systems. (Hopkins, p. 52.)

This exactly describes my own
observations of the usual scholarly systems built upon material extracted and
appropriated into doctrinal teachings outside the context of the Sutras.One point the previous quotation seems to
overlook is that Shay’s perspective was not actually just “born from careful
analysis.” Elsewhere Hopkins
acknowledges that Shay’ new (as to Tibetan’s doctrinal systems) perspective was
born of his own direct realization of the nature of reality through meditation
during an intensive retreat.Hopkins adds,

His view of “other emptiness,”
based largely on his profound understanding of the Kalachakra Tantra and commentary by Kalki Pundarika and bolstered
by the Lion’s Roar of Shrimaladevi Sutra,
and so forth, was received with amazement and shock. (Hopkins, p. 49.)

This reference to Queen Srimala’s Lion’s Roar Sutra is
more evidence that Shay was taking the perspective of the One Vehicle, as the
One Vehicle is the central teaching of that Sutra. The reference to the Kalachakra [Wheel of Time] Tantra
indicates the profound meditation techniques of this method of Tantra. “Other
emptiness” refers to the label used to indicate Shay’s challenge to the
Yogacara model of seeing phenomenal things (dharmas)
as having an inherent self-nature, so that while dharmas are ultimately empty, they are not empty of
self-characteristics . Under the rubric of “other emptiness,” Shay “taught that
conventional phenomena are self-empty, in the sense that they lack any
self-nature, whereas the ultimate is other-empty, in the sense that it is empty
of the relative but has its own self-nature.” (Hopkins, p. 49.)This “own self-nature” of the ultimate is
none other than the True Suchness of the One Mind of the One Vehicle teachings.

The nuances of this
“other-emptiness” verses “self-emptiness” debate are too convoluted to detail
here, .As stated earlier, Hopkins’ book details the attempt by the Gelug-ba
school’s founder Dzong-ka-ba to refute Shay’s teachings in the Mind-Only
section of Dzong-ka-ba’s treatise The
Essence of Eloquence.However, as I
read Hopkins translation and synopsis of the text, Dzong-ka-pa does not present
persuasive arguments against Shay’s teaching of other-emptiness nor does
Dzong-ka-pa present a clear rationalization for the validity of his separation
of systems when contrasted to the One Vehicle’s and Shay’s syncretic approach. Dzong-ka-ba fails to refute Shay’s accurate
presentation of the relationship of the Three Own-nature (trisvabhava) and agues unsuccessfully in favor of the Yogacara
misinterpretation.Based on Hopkins
book, Dzong-ka-ba’s doctrinal analysis appears to be mostly logical fallacies
of smoke and mirrors, relying on intellectual wordiness and being oblivious to
Shay’s (and Zen’s) necessity of actual meditation methods taking one beyond
words to generate one’s own realization that all things are only manifestation
of mind, which is the genuine Mind-Only teaching.

So be alert
to the use of the term “ Mind-only,” and when you see it be sure to distinguish
if it is being used wrongly as the synonym of the Yogacara school or correctly
as label for the genuine Mind-only teachings of the One Vehicle school.